Category: 1.5 Commercial Open Source
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From the Bag of Commercial Open Source Tricks: Paying for the Upgrade
On a recent trip to Montreal, I reconnected with Marc Laporte, leader of the WikiSuite project and an old friend and fellow wiki enthusiast. Naturally, we talked about open source business strategies and he pointed me to one way of how commercial open source companies make money: They don’t provide you with a free upgrade…
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Free-to-Use, Unless You Are a Cloud Provider (The New Strategy?)
On the heels of my talk about the current licensing challenges to single-vendor open source firms, I want to discuss the resulting strategy for vendors selling to developers. Single-vendor open source firms go to market by providing software they developed to the world under an open source license. The goal is to create a large…
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Why Now? And Who? The Struggle Over Single-Vendor / Open-Core Licensing
Update 2023-08-26: Redis writes to us that they rebranded from Redis Labs, to Redis. In yesterday’s talk I reviewed the current licensing struggle of single-vendor open source firms. Single-vendor open source firms go to market by providing software they developed for free, under an open source license, while also offering a commercially licensed version of…
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Single-Vendor Open Source at the Crossroads (Slides) #lfosls
I’ll be giving a presentation on single-vendor open source today at the Linux Foundation Open Source Leadership Summit 2019. Abstract: Most venture capital funding in open source flows to single-vendor open source firms. With the struggles over licensing in the cloud, these companies find themselves at the crossroads: Stay true to open source or move…
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My top three trends for open source in 2019 (2/3)
Trend #2 for 2019 in my book is making single-vendor open source, also known as the open core model a.k.a. neo-proprietary open source, work in the world of cloud computing. In this model, a software vendor goes to market using an intellectual property strategy that combines open sourcing of the product with an aggressive copyleft…
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Some argue that dual-licensing in commercial open source indicates a lack of ability to provide superior service
This is obviously wrong. The use of dual licensing and the ability to provide superior service for open source are unrelated forms of competitive advantage, and without further circumstances, a business should exploit both advantages. Let me explain. Dual (or multiple) licensing is a strategy, in which a company develops software, releases it under an…